5/21/02 - 9:18 p.m.

Welcome back Anti-Profound! You should get drunk more often! It's good to see you posting again!

And ha ha. I just got a job. (I'm allowed to laugh, because I've been unemployed for nearly a year -- so it's okay....)

I have virtually nothing to say tonight, but felt I should put a new entry up to welcome you back. Here's a description of what my life is like these days...

I woke up this morning. My bed felt so good, I'd had such a nice dream. I didn't want to go to work. When I got there I walked around in a daze, slowly picking at the things I'd start doing that would get the day rolling. More things came in to distract me. The morning passed. I took a nap during my lunch hour.

And once I got rolling, things weren't so bad. The day passed without ever getting too stressful -- other than the fact that I can't really organize what I'm doing, so I hop and flit from meaningless task to meaningless task until it's time to go. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It does make the time go faster....

So what's the problem? The thing that frustrates me most is when I get home, I just can't seem to find anything worthwhile to do with "my time" -- that would offset the little losses of freedom I experienced throughout the day. In the work-weeks to come, day after day of this -- do I continually lose a little bit more?

Enjoy your freedom while you have it.

I thought this job was going to be good for me. That I was going to learn to like working. And I have learned some things. What it's like to have a job that you're not really afraid of losing, for one thing. Or a boss that never raises his voice, and doesn't seem to care if you come in a little late or leave a little early. I'm even enjoying the routine, the having-to-get-up-early and executing the tricky drive in to work.

I need to find the right balance -- time for me, time for them. And I just can't, right now. I either go in and stumble through the morning like a zombie -- or I come home too jacked up, and completely out of touch with myself. The strangest thing is: it doesn't seem to matter if I'm a zombie at work. The job is that easy.

And even stranger: I don't seem to mind if I'm completely out of touch with myself.

So, yeah, either way I win.

Maybe that's enough, though. Sometimes you just need some time to pass, to heal. There were periods where I thought I was malingering too long, under the guise of "healing," instead of dealing with problems head-on. But as long as you keep on living in some way, I think the healing takes place, even if you don't always perceive it.

Writing this I realize that I probably could figure out my life, if I'd just stop and take the time to take a serious look. I'm resisting it, because -- well, obviously it's not really fun to sort through which parts of your life you're going to throw away and which parts you're going to subject to wrenching changes.

And so this is the compromise I've made.